


On Me Now

by AnnetheCatDetective



Category: The Venture Bros
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 07:26:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12648909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: Pete's side of things during 'The Invisible Hand of Fate'.





	1. The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face

**Author's Note:**

> Slight editing because just glancing over it I cringed so badly, but essentially this is as I wrote it in 2010, when I was on LJ under the name 'glasgowsmiles'.
> 
> (I a little bit hate me-from-seven-years-ago sometimes... I am mostly not going to edit the things I put up from way back when, but ugh)

It all started the day the toilet in my dressing room bathroom clogged up and no one came around to deal with it. 

It’s funny to think that could be the start of anything remotely auspicious, but it’s like my whole life started when I couldn’t even stay in my dressing room without gagging, so I snuck down to the hall bathroom, between the boys’ dressing rooms and the green room full of stage moms. 

My makeup was done, my wig was on—mostly. I needed a mirror to make sure I was fit to go out on stage, and I needed a room that wasn’t choking in the scent of mild indigestion. Everybody believed I had my own personal makeup lady, someone who’d been with me from the small-time or something, because I never used the show’s makeup room. I came in, early, flashed my security pass to somebody and said I was ‘Mr. White’s assistant’, and changed into my suit from wardrobe in my dressing room, where I did all my own makeup, just the same as it had been when I’d auditioned for the show. Nobody working on Quizboys knew what I looked like, and the security guy who checked me in every morning probably wouldn’t even pick me out of a lineup with everybody he has to look at day in and day out. Which is saying something.

So I ducked into the hall bathroom to make any final adjustments in the mirror and give myself a last minute pep talk, and that’s when I saw our returning champion.

Shaving.

“Uh... This isn’t what it looks like!” Billy yelped.

“Really?” I raised an eyebrow. According to the mirror behind Billy it was impeccable, like the rest of my perfect, tanned face.

... I should’ve been born with this face. This face is so easy to love. This is a freakin’ popular face with the freakin’ flawless, even tan I’ll never see without Messers Ben Nye and Max Factor.

“... Really?” He shrank in on himself a little, and for the first time I really saw him. He was little and chipmunk-cheeked and he had a big head and open, innocent-looking eyes all right, but he wasn’t ten... there was some kind of unidentifiable signal of age, and without ever looking for it, or paying that much attention to him, I hadn’t seen it. 

“Relax, kid.” I patted his shoulder. “I’m not going to tell anyone. Anyone who can drown in the shallow end of the swimming pool can use the leg up this show can give, I guess.”

“Actually,” Billy said, with the same lecturer’s expression I’d seen on a lot of the contestants, none of whom I’d ever really paid attention to, but then again, the rest of them really had been little kids. “A person can drown in as little as thirty millimeters of water.”

“I’ve decided I like you.” I said.

“... Really?” He seemed to doubt this was possible. 

I remembered a childhood where casual dislike was the best I could expect, before I was sixteen or so and just decided to act as though I was popular and pray people took the hint, and in a limited way that worked, and of course college was better than high school ever could have been for me, but I knew what it was like to cringe and expect the beating.

“Yeah.” I said, swiping shaving foam off his chin before it could dribble down onto his shirt. “Take care of that. Don’t want anybody else in on this little secret, right?”

“Gee, thanks, Mr. White!”

“Billy, do us both a favor and when it’s just you and me, don’t pretend you’re a little kid. It’s kind of creepy now that I’ve seen you shave.” I said. “Though I guess now I don’t have to wonder why I’ve never met your parents.”

Not to mention, sure most of the kids who come on the show are smart. One or two sweep trivia questions about old movies like they memorized the dialogue. But I can’t imagine a kid in our age bracket being a fan of the old Rusty Venture show. I mean, does that even play on TV anymore? Not that it wouldn’t be cheap to get in syndication, I’m sure, but I’d notice if it ever played on one of the local affiliates. I mean, I spent more time in his dorm room than my own back in college, I’d know if his show was on TV again.

Does that make Billy my age? I don’t know, still kind of doubtful. He’s not a kid, but when I look at him, there’s no sense of crushed dreams and disappointment, just a fresh-faced optimism. Some of it might be for show, but if he were my age, there’d be a certain world-weariness, wouldn’t there?

Sometime between originally airing and now, it must’ve re-run. Or he’s a geek for that kind of thing. I mean, he’s gotta be a geek for everything else, he’s already had a killer run.

\---/-/---

“What do you want?” Chuck looked up at me with uncontained skepticism and resentment. 

I glanced down at the box of donuts in my hands and around the writers’ room. It was a comfortable enough space. Low lighting, chairs with lumbar support. Someone was playing Rush, but it was ‘Limelight’, so it was tolerable. ‘Moving Pictures’ I can handle. ‘Fly By Night’ not so much. 

“Okay, I’ll cut to the chase.” I said, because maybe some of the others would’ve bought my just being friendly, but Chuck wouldn’t, and the guys who’d been with him long enough wouldn’t either. “I need to know ahead of time if you’re gonna drop those million dollar words in. I mean, I’ll say whatever you put on the cards, but if I look like an idiot because I wasn’t expecting to ask questions about trichinosis.”

“Trichinosis isn’t that hard to say.”

“Okay, what about last week?” I defended. “I had an ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, a ‘streptococcus’, and an ‘Uzbekistan’. All I’m asking is a quick heads up if there’s going to be a word that I have to read in my head first, because otherwise it all just comes out of my mouth, and it’s better for everybody involved if the words coming out of my mouth sound smooth.”

\---/-/---

I visited with Billy a couple of times outside of the show. A couple minutes in the green room debating the merits of different directors, or an hour in the commissary where the snotty cashier made a big scene asking who was responsible for him and I stepped in and said I was until his mother got back from an emergency errand, and we talked about nothing and everything, and it’s not so much that we have a lot in common as it is the things we don’t have in common are so complimentary.

And we have enough in common.

And I want him to stay on the show. Not just because I haven’t had a friend since college, either. Because I want him to get the money. Because walking back down to the green room after lunch he confessed that he’d had to put off college, that getting enough money to get into a good school had looked impossible, that this show was his shot at a future, and I’ve never had a perfectly selfless thought before that day in my life, but I wanted Billy to have a future. 

After all, I had mine, didn’t I? He deserved a real, normal life as much as I ever have, and maybe he doesn’t have a shot at one, but he could win big and go to college and make something of himself.

Besides, it was always good for ratings. We’d never had a kid last longer than a week at the top before. Billy may have had a bit of an unfair advantage, but he blew them all out of the water. He’d have enough dough to get him into school somewhere, and a little bit of fame as a boy genius, and maybe I’d, I don’t know, get a bit part in a movie or something, like Merv Griffin in ‘The Man With Two Brains’. 


	2. On the Run

“Brought you something.” I tossed the magazine down on the green room coffee table. “You spend a lot of time here.”

Billy shrugged. “I have to take the shuttle from the hotel. The next latest one is too late to get into makeup. It’s getting harder to fake having parents... thanks for covering for me the other day, by the way. At least now I’m not the only one who’s ‘met’ them.”

“No problem. I guess if you’re dependent on the bus you don’t get out too much.”

“Nope. Just the hotel and the station.” He shrugged again. “It’s not so bad. Ah, Scientific American... just what the doctor ordered!”

“Well, I gotta go get dolled up.” I lied. 

I don’t know why. I could tell him. Who’s he to judge? But I’d been in the habit so long... so I sequestered myself in my dressing room and pretended to be getting my makeup done, an hour and a half after I’d set it in place and pinned down my wig. 

\---/-/---

“White.” Billy’s voice sounded dark, almost haunted, when I admitted him into my dressing room after the show, and I hastily hid my hand in my pocket, glad I hadn’t taken the wig off yet. 

“What’s up, fella?” I grinned broadly and tried to affect a casual lean against my vanity. 

“Tell me it’s a coincidence.” He said, and it still sounded hollow, and he wasn’t looking at me and probably wouldn’t even notice if I had one freakishly pink-white hand. 

“What’s a coincidence?” I laughed it off with a confidence I did not feel. 

“Scientific American. The article. The question.”

“Billy, I just read the cards they give me.” I said. “Besides, you’re the whiz kid with super science dreams. Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.”

“Just... Promise me you’re not going to turn me into another Charles Van Doren.” He said.

“I don’t even know who that is.” I promised. I mean, I meant it as a reassurance, but he just groaned and walked out.

I felt bad, but I didn’t stop. If I could unobtrusively slip in a hint, I did it. I never told him what was coming up—he wouldn’t take the help if he knew that was what it was. But if I picked my battles, took the ones that I wasn’t sure he knew, slipped them in so they could pass as coincidences even under scrutiny... 

And maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe he knew all that stuff already. 

“I didn’t even run out and buy that Scientific American before the show.” I said, following him down the hallway. “I’d already read through it a couple times before I passed it on to you.”

“... Yeah?” Some of the wariness fell away, replaced by naked interest. 

Okay, I don’t need to think the words ‘naked’ and ‘interest’ together when I’m thinking about Billy. I don’t know how it happened, exactly. It never would have if I hadn’t seen him shaving, I know that much, because before that I never gave him a second glance, he was just another one of Them, the endless parade of Quizboys, some astute, some surprisingly mediocre, but all of them just a nerdy, sticky part of my job. 

Then he became an adult, then he became a sort of friend, and then... Then he became someone who had heard of Ultravox and Aztec Camera, and even arguing with him was fun, and somewhere in there I guess he kind of became my perfect man without me even thinking about the whole, you know... thing. 

“It was my major. Computer science, I mean. I kinda got into this whole line of work accidentally. I love it, I mean. Wouldn’t trade it in. But sometimes I pick up a magazine for the glossy color photos of transistors and vacuum tubes.” I smiled. 

“Wow. I never would’ve guessed.”

“Hey, I’m not just an idiot with great hair, you know.” I said. After all, the hair wasn’t really mine...

“No, I know, I know. I just... didn’t know you were a science major.”

“Computer science. I mean, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about biology, or chemistry, or, I don’t know, nuclear physics. Theoretical physics, maybe. Like, the interesting stuff that pops up in your better class of sci-fi novel, but...” I shrugged. 

“You never talk about that kind of stuff, though. You should, I think you’re way more interesting now that I know you’ve got some hidden depths.”

It shouldn’t have made me as happy as it did to hear that. 

\---/-/---

For the most part, Billy really didn’t need my help. He knew everything about everything, and he spent most of his time reading about the things he didn’t know everything about, except for when I came along and bothered him. 

For the most part, everything went fine. 

Then the Plantagenet thing happened, and I didn’t have time to think, I just... did. I was in a blind panic with a plastic smile frozen on my face and a magic control panel that could just fix everything if he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut, and he was the smartest guy I knew, he had to be that smart, it had to... it had to work.

\---/-/---

The way I see it, we didn’t _steal_ the moped, that was his free and clear before I ever started meddling, definitely before I meddled for real, and maybe he was still mad at me now, but I was going to fix things. 

The only problem was taking care of tonight. Billy had already been tossed out of his hotel, I wasn’t going home to battle my way through a horde of reporters out for blood—they wouldn’t recognize me, maybe, but if there’s even one news van camped out in front of the house I could never really afford and went for anyway, there’s no way I can get in with the fallen boy genius they really want. 

We can’t walk into a bar and pray it’s quiz bowl night, they’d run us out on a rail, which sounds pretty uncomfortable for everybody. The only place we can go is underground, and the tip-offs I’ve gotten say the next game is tomorrow night. Which leaves us completely broke until then.

“What are we going to do? White?” Billy tugged at the hem of my windbreaker and I shook my head, hoping for a little clarity.

It always seems to work for guys in movies or on TV, but it didn’t really do anything for me. “It’s okay, Billy. We’re gonna be okay.”

“But—what about tonight? Where are we going to sleep?”

I had exactly enough money in my wallet for a couple of lousy burgers, which was not enough for even the cheapest possible motel. 

“First, we’re not gonna starve.” I promised. “Come on, you’ll feel better after you eat something.”

This might have been promising too much, I’m not sure how ‘better’ people generally feel after greasy fast food, but it was still more than nothing. 

“Okay, this is what’s gonna happen;” I said, pushing the rest of the fries across the table towards him. “We’ll find a shelter or something. There are all kinds of places like that! I’ll say you’re my kid, no one can turn down a homeless single father with an adorable eight year old—can you play eight?”

“Easy.” He snorted. “You sure you don’t want any more of these?”

“Watching my figure.” I shrugged. “They’ll give us a couple cots in the corner, and it’s not like we’ll have anything worth stealing, so people will leave us alone.”

Billy nodded, finishing the fries. We’d split the one order of those between us, and all things considered, it was probably overkill on my part to grab two handfuls of ketchup packets. I mean, we used three, max, and that’s on the fries and both burgers. Why’d I pick up, like, ten of the things? I shoved the extras in my jacket pocket. I’d already abandoned my house and everything in it to get repossessed when I dropped off the face of the earth, I might as well have something more to my name than the clothes on my back, even if it is just ketchup.

\---/-/---

Every single men’s shelter, soup kitchen, and church outreach program was full-up by the time we got there. 

“You gotta line up early.” One grubby, possibly insane gentleman told me. 

“Good tip.” I said. 

Billy and I spent the night under an overpass. 

“Is this safe?” He asked. “I mean... what if we get killed by a murderous drifter?”

“That could just as easily happen in the homeless shelter.” I said. It didn’t come out as reassuring as I meant it. “No, wait, look. It’s perfectly safe.”

There was a flat ledge behind one of the big blocky support columns, where I could lean the moped up against the wall and lean myself up against the moped, feet braced against said support column. I took off the Quizboys windbreaker and pulled Billy up into my lap, draping it around him.

“It’s not the warmest thing ever, but... Well, you know.” I said. “Anyway, it probably won’t get too cold tonight.”

He looked up at me like he knew everything I’d said was complete crap and he expected it to start pouring rain the second I closed my mouth, but it didn’t rain and eventually, a little bit of trust crept back into his eyes and he put his head on my shoulder and fell asleep.

I dozed a little, I think, on and off. Just enough to have a really weird dream, but not so much that I wasn’t aware of the hours ticking by slowly, and eventually I watched the world get lighter around us. 

I let Billy sleep on. He woke up on his own around six-thirty.

“Sorry. I think I drooled a little on your shirt.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I shook my head, putting my jacket back on. 

 

I felt dirty checking payphones for change, but between that and the couple quarters left in my pocket after dinner, we were able to get breakfast. 

We spent most of the day in the library. I hid Billy in the children’s section and snuck in volumes of the Encyclopedia World Book. 

“Okay, I know the local MC. This is real raw stuff, there’s no writer’s room. The gamerunner comes up with all the questions, and that means focusing largely on what they know or have on hand. For this one, that’s English lit and history. Don’t worry too much about math, but the arts could come into play, and there’s long odds on at least one hard science question, but for now you want to bone up on history.”

Billy nodded, poring over the As. 

“Did you know,”  He said eventually. “Arachnid moths lay their eggs inside other insects along the borders of fields or roads in clusters of white cocoons?”

“I did not.” I made a face. “I did not ever need to know that. I wish I could un-know that.”

“Well I can’t un-know it and neither can you.”

“Don’t tell me anything else insect related.” I said. There was movement near the door to the children’s room, and I hastily took the World Book from Billy and shoved a Hardy Boys mystery into his hands. 

“What grade level does he read at?” One of those suburban mother types asked, giving Billy a sticky-sweet indulgent smile.

“Uh... Third?” I said. It sounded good. What was normal for a supposedly eight-to-ten year old? I didn’t remember which grades were which, and I had no idea what grade level the Hardy Boys were. Either a kid could read good or he couldn’t, what the hell deal was there with grade levels?

“Sixth.” Billy hissed, consulting the book I’d handed him. I didn’t see a suggested grade level on the cover or anything, but hey, the Quizboy’s gotta know better than I do about this kind of random crap.

“I mean sixth.” I laughed. Suburban Mom actually looked at me instead of Billy for the first time.

She got that look they all get, vaguely uncomfortable, wondering how PC she’s got to be and how long she now needs to act polite before she can stop looking at the freakshow she never bought a ticket for.

“His, ah, mother used to have sole custody.” I explained. “Before the... well, the car accident. It’s hard, but we’re reconnecting, and we’ll get by.”

“He’s a very adorable boy.” She took the ‘look at something’ else tactic. I guess she doesn’t watch game shows, or go in for tabloids, because she didn’t recognize Billy at all. “So precocious!”

Her kid was picking his nose with the corner of ‘The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar’. I could’ve plopped a real, normal small child down in front of her and she’d still think it was a genius, if that’s her base line. 

I wonder if she’s wondering what kind of woman voluntarily had my offspring, if she had to bite her tongue before she could say ‘he must take after his mother’. And the thing is, it’s not me, I’m not hideously unattractive. My bone structure is awesome, if it wasn’t I couldn’t slap on a wig and makeup and look suave and handsome, but I can, and I do, and I know it. Like, an ounce of melanin and instead of looking away nervously, she’d be cooing over how hard I must work as a single parent.

Instead she rushed her kid through the process of finding a book he hadn’t already smeared with the contents of his nasal passages, whispered ‘it’s not nice to stare’ way too loud, and hustled him out the door.

Billy went back to the World Book with a sigh of relief.

“’The Secret of the Old Mill’ is somewhere around level six.” He informed me. “I mean, there’s some wiggle room, and I’m not sure if she actually meant, like, school grade, or if she was talking the Flesch-Kincaid scale, but... well, I guess it doesn’t matter right now.”

“I guess not.” I said. I’d been a good enough reader as a kid, as long as I thought the book was interesting. Faster and smarter than most of the kids around me—at least that’s how it seemed to me at the time—but my grades never showed it in elementary school. Either I’d forget to do my homework, or I’d forget to turn my homework in, or I’d ignore it completely because I thought homework was stupid, or if by some miracle I’d done everything I was supposed to, some jackass would think it was funny to steal my homework. 

I wondered what school had been like for Billy. Public? Would’ve been hell. Private? Didn’t sound like his family had the money, but maybe. Home tutoring? Probably the best of all possible worlds, and besides, a lot of the Quizboys were homeschooled, though Billy was a totally different thing anyway.

I shaped up at some point, academically. Went into overdrive, actually. Completed as much as I could as fast as I could so I could graduate early, get the hell out, and start over someplace where people understood me. Or at least where I could pretend that the only reason they didn’t was because they were not so esoterically cool. It worked, anyway, in a limited sense. If I got lazy after that, well... so what?  



	3. The Future's So Bright

After Billy’s spectacular turn at the underground quiz bowl, we didn’t have to go back to sleeping under the overpass. I checked into a motel near the bowl location—it was a three-night engagement, before the participants scattered, forced into back alley Trivial Pursuit matches and shakily watching Jeopardy! through electronics store windows, jonesing for their next fix.

I used the same single-father-with-a-dead-ex-wife story, or at least a close variation on the theme, when we checked in. 

“You got the last room.” The bored clerk said, tossing me the keys without really looking at me. It really had started to rain outside now, and I wasn’t about to make a fuss if we wound up with the room next to the noisy ice machine or something. 

The room had just one bed, but we weren’t in any mood to argue over it now. He’d already fallen asleep on me once out-of-doors, a single motel bed was nothing to fight about. 

“Somehow I doubt you want any of the relevant statistics.” He said, eyeing the bedspread with open distaste. 

The whole room smelled like dust. “I don’t think this particular bed’s seen any action in a long time, partner.”

It wasn’t next to a noisy ice machine, but it was the furthest walk from the registration desk, you had to go outside, around the building, and up a flight of stairs because that side of the motel didn’t have a working elevator, and the window faced a brick wall across a narrow alley. We were not vending machine-adjacent.

It made sense that this room never got rented out and only periodically got what you might call cleaned. The motel probably didn’t fill up very often—no pool, no continental breakfast, no magic fingers. I mean, you couldn’t argue with the rock bottom prices, but it just wasn’t in the kind of location that got heavy traffic. 

Under the ugly floral bedspread there was a thick, wooly burnt orange blanket, and under that there were thin, scratchy sheets, and under that, there was a mattress neither one of us really wanted to look at, but hey, beats the hell out of sleeping under an overpass, especially with the rain really breaking loose out there. 

The post-win euphoria was starting to wear off, and Billy swallowed his reservations about the motel, the room, the bed, the bedding, and pulled the drawer out of his nightstand to use as a stepstool. He was out when his head hit the pillow, and I wound up tucking us both in. 

I went to sleep with my back to him. Partly because it would cut down on any potential urge to cuddle—not that I’ve ever been particularly cuddly, but you never know what might accidentally happen when you’re trying to platonically share a bed with someone—and partly because it meant I could face the door. Just in case. Being one step up from the overpass didn’t necessarily mean you could stop worrying about murderous drifters, I guess.

I gave Billy a small chunk of his winnings in the morning, spent the rest buying cheap food and toiletries, a road map, and a change of clothes for each of us. If we wanted the motel room another night, we’d have to win another night.

\---/-/---

Billy was two for two, and I was talking to everyone I could at the bowl to find out where our next stop was. I got all the info I could on other underground matches between here and Rusty’s, when they’d happen, what the byword was to get in. Some people were happy to talk, and some people were guarded, but I was able to plot out a solid route on the map that would get us there with a few emergency money-making stops in between.

After the match, I divided the winnings up again, handing a little over to Billy, re-securing our motel room and gassing up the little motor scooter. There was a Laundromat a block from the motel and I left Billy in the room and walked down to wash the clothes we’d started in and all the linens and towels from the motel. Might as well get my quarters’ worth, I guess. 

He had his nose buried in the dog-eared Gideon’s Bible when I got back, lips moving furiously, repeating begats to himself over and over again. 

“That’s not gonna come up.” I promised, taking the Bible away. “You wanna go back to the library?”

“Sure.” He smiled—for a second, he looked actually _comfortable_ —and we put the room back in order, hung up the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on a room that management and housekeeping had probably forgotten about entirely before we came in looking to rent it out.

On the ground level, by where we were parked, there was a handful of permanent markers scattered on the ground, and in big, uneven letters on yellowing stucco, the words ‘My mother made me a homosexual’. I picked up one of the markers, and a second one when the first didn’t write, and added ‘If I buy her the yarn, will she make me one, too?’. Billy giggled and offered me a high five.

“I feel like such a vandal.” I grinned, accepting the gesture. It was inherently dorky but sort of cute at the same time. It was a microcosm of Billy.

“A creative vandal.” He grinned right along with me, hopping up on the back of the scooter. “We’re outlaws now. We can do that sort of thing.”

“Yeah. Underground quiz bowls, erudite graffiti. Where does it end?” I gunned the motor—as much as that motor _could_ be gunned, anyway. “To the library!”

Billy laughed, held onto me as we pretended the library was a natural place for the badass rebels we half-pretended we were.

\---/-/---

Crappy motels and cheap food aside, the trip was good. Fun, even. Hell, even the quality of our room and board was nothing to complain about when you looked at the big picture. Billy was on a hot streak, and even if it couldn’t bring him the public vindication he deserved, the guys he thrashed sure knew he was smarter than them, fair and square.

And we had a future to look forward to. Rusty’d probably have to call Billy an intern, pay him a little less, what with his not having gone to college yet, but no biggie. He’d start MIT with some real world experience! And since I had my fallback position as computer scientist, we... we’d have to start out small, sure, maybe we’d get a little apartment together or something, the jobs won’t pay a lot, but that doesn’t matter. It’ll be great reminiscing with Rusty about the old days through a nice hazy filter of nostalgia, and Billy’s thrilled about meeting his boyhood hero, and in the meantime, he’s having a great time answering the trivia he was born to answer, and I’m having a great time watching him.

This is the last underground bowl before we get to the old Venture Compound—haven’t actually seen the place since Rusty called my dorm room from there and asked, in a weird, halting way, if I ‘wanted to attend a funeral or something’. Afterwards, I went back to school and he didn’t, though I guess he finished up somewhere else. I don’t know, we haven’t really kept in touch too much since, but every so often I hear something about him. His name crops up in the science mags or something like that and I remember I’d been meaning to call him, maybe.

Billy’s completely confident stepping up to the makeshift podiums now, the shady venues and crowds and the jeers of his competitors no longer seeming like such a big threat, and I stand along the wall, what would be the wings in any respectable quiz show venue, in the spot set aside for ‘the stage moms’. 

“Which one’s yours?” A woman asks, her voice hoarse. She has a cigarette in her hand and a dress like a sofa, and she obviously birthed the sofa-sized, zit-faced thirteen year old. They even have the same bouffant. The same ham-like arms. I think they even have the same lazy eye.

“The little guy.” I said. I’d gotten so used to calling Billy ‘mine’ it didn’t even feel weird anymore. It halfway didn’t even feel like a lie. 


	4. Never Let Me Down Again

Getting turned away was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. Maybe Rusty Venture didn’t owe me anything, but I thought he’d treat me a little better, and it looked like they were having kind of a rough time over there, but that’s no excuse. 

He completely belittled me, and in front of Billy, who... I mean, I promised everything was going to be okay! I’m the best friend this guy has the entire time he’s at State, I miss a Communications exam because he wanted someone he knew at his old man’s funeral other than the parade of weird old men who’d made his childhood hell, and now I need something from him, he’s too good for us? I don’t care who he’s got working for him, there is no way anyone on his staff is half as smart as Master fucking Billy Quizboy, I’ll tell you that much, and I don’t know where he gets off saying I was no good at science when he cheated off me on our Computer Science midterm! I’d like to see him use a punchcard system if he’d never met me!

We were driving directionless, and I know driving mad is stupid, and probably especially stupid on a motor scooter which offers virtually no protection if you accidentally run off the road and into a tree, but since trees were fucking few and far between, I just drove.

We stopped at a convenience mart, where I plunked down a couple bucks on toaster pastries that we ate un-toasted in the parking lot. I didn’t have much left. We’d been heading south, though, and if we kept heading south, then eventually...

Eventually what? Eventually we’d hit Mexico? Well, the cost of living would be cheaper, I guess. No. Eventually I’d find another quiz bowl. As many as I had to find, until I could get something real lined up. 

\---/-/---

We were in the cheapest motel yet, a little blip on the roadside called the ‘Star Lite Inn’, except the letters had all fizzled out so the only thing that lit up was ‘Sta   i     n’. It seemed disturbingly prophetic. No pool, no cable, no nothing, it was exactly what we needed. Just a bed and a roof and a door.

I hardly slept. Couldn’t. Rusty’d turned us away. I didn’t have a plan anymore. Billy didn’t have something to look forward to anymore. 

I stepped outside while Billy slept. I didn’t go far—I couldn’t bear to wander off too far, even though it was out of the way enough I didn’t think there’d be much crime, I wasn’t just going to wander off and leave him, sleeping alone and unprotected in a strange room, with a particle-board door that didn’t have a safety chain and a window that didn’t quite shut. 

I leaned against the salmon stucco wall, sinking slowly down, feeling the rough scrape of it through my t-shirt ‘til my ass hit the pavement and I let out a shaky sigh. If we could get one more really good win... if we could get one more really good win, we wouldn’t have to live like this. And I’d get a job, the crappiest job in the world even, if it meant making things up to Billy. If he’d stick around with me, that is. I guess now that I can’t get him in with Rusty, his motivation to give me a chance is waning, but I want to make things right for the little guy. 

I want him to like me, when all is said and done. Because somehow or other, he started meaning a hell of a lot to me, and I can’t go back to being alone now. I’ve been alone all my life, I guess, and I’ve been selfish, and I’ve been okay with that, and now Billy’s gone and ruined everything for me just as much as I ruined everything for him... ‘cause I don’t want to be that guy again. Not if I don’t have him. I’m not saying he’s made me altruistic or nothing, but the little circle of what’s important to me has widened, and Billy Whalen’s on the inside now and nothing’s pushing him back out.

“Hey, buddy.” A voice hissed from the dark side of the building, out by the dumpsters. 

I jumped up. “If I had any money I wouldn’t be staying here!”

“I figured.” The guy stepped forward to where I could see him. 

He was short-ish, middle aged-ish, Hispanic-ish. Around here, he could have been anybody. The fact that he was talking to me from beside a dumpster behind a trashy motel made me think he banked on it.

“You look like you’re in trouble, man.”

“Yeah? So what’s it to you?” I crossed my arms. 

“Hey, white boy, I’m trying to help.”

I wonder if he calls anybody vaguely Caucasian and male ‘white boy’, or if it’s, you know, a literal thing. Probably not a lot of use in wondering. “Okay, so help.”

“On the run from the law?” He sounded sympathetic. “I know places you could go... safe places. All you have to do is tell them Carlos sent you. And... there’s a price. But it’s nothing a man on the run can’t afford, even if he is reduced to staying at the Star Lite Inn.”

“No, I—“ Was I on the run from the law? Well... maybe. I mean, in a moral sense, the scooter wasn’t theft, but in a legal sense, ‘Quizboys’ probably thought it was. Plus, I’d defaulted on a hefty mortgage... and ran off with a guy that various organizations are probably trying to investigate. And the whole fraud thing, yeah, I guess I’m on the run from the law. “Look, if you want to help me...” 

There was a glint in his eye, the cold kind, and I dug a bill out of my back pocket and wondered if I’d regret this. 

“If you want to help me, there’s only one thing I want to know. I need to know the nearest underground quiz bowl. If I can just make a quick bundle there, then... then I’ll cut you in on fifteen percent, okay? Consider this an up-front.”

“A five dollar up-front? Man, you’re lucky Carlos is _already_ raking in fifteen percent from the...” He coughed. “ _Underground quiz bowl_. I’ll draw you a map. But you remember you still owe me if your bets pay off.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.” I shifted, antsy, watched him try to write up against the rough wall. “Who’s Carlos?”

“... I’m Carlos.” He blinked at me.

Apparently, Carlos is the kind of guy who occasionally refers to himself in the third person, then. The map he gave me had a couple holes in it where the pen stabbed through the paper on the uneven surface, but it was legible. 

“Your _quiz bowl_ is tomorrow night. Come by after dark. The action doesn’t start ‘til nine, but you want to get there before the betting window closes.”

I headed back inside and collapsed onto my bed, glancing back over at Billy. Sleeping like a log. I’d tell him about our stroke of luck in the morning. And from there... Well, from there we’d make it work, I guess.

I hope.

\---/-/---

I tooled off a ways, insides burning with shame and mild acid reflux from the last meal I’d had, and I waited until I saw a car go by. It’s one thing respecting his wishes, but it’s another leaving him to die in the desert. I don’t know who was driving that car, but nobody’s heart is black enough that they’d see what looked like a little kid wandering out there and not pull over.

A dog fight. I still had trouble believing it. Aside from the patrons it hadn’t looked so different from the other quiz bowls, not at first. I signed Billy up and put all the dough on him, and then when I turned around, he was down in the arena, and instead of podiums, there were cages, and instead of answering trivia questions, all of a sudden he was being attacked by a pit bull.

I jumped into the ring without even thinking about it. I’d never done anything like that before. I’d never done anything selfless for anyone before I met Billy, and there I was jumping into the ring with a pit bull, wrapping one arm around it’s throat and scrabbling desperately for the hinge of the jaw to try and force a release, and I couldn’t see, and all I could smell was blood, and my heart was pounding in my ears, but not nearly loud enough to drown out the scream, I could still hear it even now, and...

And he resented my trying to save his life? 

I’m not a good man. 

Billy Whalen made me try, just a little. Selfless is against my nature, and in the end, I guess it’s just as well, because selfless didn’t really get me anything and now he hates me. I hope whoever was driving that car gets him taken care of... Maybe I’ll never know what happened to him, but at least I can believe he got picked up. 

I couldn’t get the dog off of him... I tried so hard, and it wouldn’t let go, and he was batting at its muzzle with his free hand, kicking wildly, I couldn’t see half his face for the blood and I couldn’t get the dog off him... 

It would’ve been worse, though. Because I got him disqualified, the trainer stepped in and called the monster off. By that time, Billy didn’t so much have a hand left, and when I got his face cleaned up, I could see he didn’t so much have one of his eyes, either, and...

I pulled off to the side of the road and vomited beside a cactus. I never should have let him go, even if he told me to leave him, I never should have... What if the car didn’t pick him up? 

I was hunched over between the scooter and the cactus vomiting a second time when the big truck rolled to a stop and the driver rolled down the window. 

“Viejo!”

I got up, a little unsteady, and turned around. There was a man leaning out the window, wearing a moth-eaten red and black satin coat. 

“I’m not an old man!” I called up to him. 

“Sick?”

“No, just... A little, maybe. I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure? You look—“

“No, I’m fine. I’m just an albino.” I said. I figured he’d roll up the window and drive on, assured that I was merely a freak and not an elderly dying man. 

Instead, he said what sounded like a very quick, very thankful prayer. “Get in the truck, my friend! We’ve needed a new addition, ever since the twins left us!”

I looked at the long line of vans and semi trucks behind him, the loaded equipment and colorful signs. I looked at the sad, shabby ringmaster in the pickup at the front, and I nodded.

He helped me load the scooter into the truckbed, and we drove on.


	5. Please, Please, Please (Let Me Get What I Want)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's been kind of a trip going back to fic I'd written this year, not knowing it was about to be a momentous turn in my life, but anyway. At least not everything I wrote in 2010 was terrible dialogue-only stuff...

I was only with the freakshow of the little Mexican circus for a little while. Apparently the conjoined twins had moved on to bigger and better things, and I spent most of my time sitting around the tent with the bearded lady, the dog-faced boy, and the illustrated man.

The bearded lady doubled as a fat lady, and while the dog-faced boy (they were related somehow, but I could never remember if he was her son or her grandson or what) was clearly the big winner in the freak tent, and the illustrated man was a draw even though he had made himself into a freak on purpose, the bearded lady and I had a pretty even split when it came to who the crowd found freakier.

Well, that’s show business.

All I had to do was sit there and show a lot of skin, and since sitting around was all I felt like doing, it worked out all right. They just provided me with the costume and a space to do it in, and I sat.

Half the people who bought tickets to look on us and despair or whatever thought I was just about the freakiest thing they’d ever seen—dog-faced boy was, of course, at the end of the show, behind a special curtain. The other half thought I was just a really pale white guy and only my hairdresser knew for sure. Then again, some of the people who came through said our fat bearded lady wasn’t much fatter or more bearded than their own grandmothers, so there’s that. 

They were a good group. The animal tamers and acrobats didn’t interact much with us, but the freak tent took me in as one of their own. It was no replacement for having Billy around. I woke up at least once a night, every night, dreaming about the dog fight. 

“Mijo, one of these days are you going to tell mama what’s wrong?” The bearded lady asked, after a week of near-sleeplessness, of never managing to finish a meal, of listlessly sitting on my little pedestal and not batting an eye when small children hurled abuse and stale Circus Peanuts at me.

“Everything I love gets torn apart by wild dogs.” I said.

“Man, life’s rough, brother.” Jojo said. “I once got mistaken for a wolfman, that’s kind of like a wild dog.”

“Well, not everything. I mean, not by wild dogs. I mean, some things I love I just kind of... lose. But the really important things in life get torn apart by—Well, trained dogs. And maybe also coyotes later. I never found out what happened after I left.” I admitted. Letting it out felt good, in a cathartic way. It’s not like not talking about it ever kept me from reliving the worst parts.

 

Eventually, when we swung back up north, not far from where they’d first picked me up, the ringmaster let me go. My constant moping was too depressing for the freakshow, he’d said. They were going to look up a guy in town who swallowed metal as my replacement. 

The people who came to stare at the freaks, he’d said, came out of a morbid fascination, but they did not want to face a man laid so low as I. Still, he gave me a better back-pay package than I’d expected.

“I hope you find her again.” Was the last thing he said before he drove off into the night. 

I didn’t have the chance to say there was no ‘her’, but in the end it didn’t matter. I’d been transparent enough, I guess.

I bought the old Airstream trailer sitting out in the failed development by Rusty’s place, but I didn’t go to see him. The last time still rankled. 

I had hoped buying a home would give me some kind of... I don’t know, a sense of responsibility, duty, something. A reason to go on. Instead, it just gave me someplace else to not sleep at night. The nightmares about Billy got worse, and I gave up on trying to get any kind of night’s sleep. 

I’d gotten into that kind of zombie phase of sleep deprivation, where there’s no clear difference between the nights and the days, except one is light and one is dark and you can’t sleep during either, but you’re not quite awake anyway. When I closed my eyes I saw Billy.

I didn’t know which was worse, the times I saw him beaten and ravaged and bloody and hating me, or the times I saw him whole and perfect and smiling, and I was just strung out enough on not sleeping to almost forget it was just my brain playing tricks on me. Then I’d open my eyes and see the empty trailer and the despair would build up in me and...

It was something like water behind a dam, it’d get worse and worse until it poured out in a wail, sometimes starting even before I opened my mouth, an awful muffled grief. I didn’t even know if he was alive. I’d never told him he meant something to me. And if he wasn’t alive, _I’d_ gotten him killed. 

When I hadn’t slept for at least a week, and probably hadn’t had the recommended amount of food or water either, I thought once or twice about ending it. 

I didn’t chicken out. I just didn’t deserve a quick death. And if I wasn’t there to remember Billy, if he was gone, who would? The way he deserved to be remembered, not as a fraud and not as a joke, as a man. One who was worth something, and deserved a hell of a lot better than he got.

Besides, I was just rational enough to know that the thoughts you had when you weren’t eating, sleeping, or drinking weren’t rational, and you probably shouldn’t act on them.

I had about half the pages of the tabloid still. The one outing him as a cheater. It should’ve been me splashed across that front page, I got away with barely a mention the first time the press went after him. Later I’m sure someone looked into things. Later I’m sure someone figured out I had to be playing a huge part in it, even if no one thought I was solely responsible. It had been folded up in my pocket, with the ketchup packets that have long since been turned into the world’s worst instant condensed tomato soup. 

It was pictures of him. It was the only few I had. 

It was all I had.

\---/-/---

I barely recognized Brock Samson when he pulled up in front of my house—well, trailer. I’d only really met him once, he looked different without the mustache, and also not beating me up. 

Somewhere in my less-than-rational brain, I’d come up with the perfect plan, though at any given time I couldn’t remember most of it. Right now all I remembered was that I had had what seemed like a perfectly good reason for being outside in the middle of the day in my underpants. 

I was wrapped in the Quizboys windbreaker, clutching Billy’s picture from the tabloids. I’d had some grand idea or other about redemption through some kind of long, intense, poetic suffering, I think. I was going to get cancer or waste away and someone would find me there, but my plan fell apart because I was supposed to write up an explanation of everything I’d done wrong, and I’d never mustered up the energy to do it, so if someone did find, like, a skeleton in a Quizboys jacket, they wouldn’t understand what it all meant.

Samson placed a duffle bag at my feet. “Glad I tracked you down. Found something of yours.”

I didn’t say anything at first. Even if I’d been in my right mind, I wouldn’t have known what to say. Something of mine? I had nothing. When and where could he have found something of mine?

Then he opened the bag and I saw Billy. For a brief terrible moment I thought he was dead, but he was breathing, I could see him breathing. He had a patch over his missing eye and a metal hand, but he was breathing, he was here, I couldn’t believe he was back with me. 

I held onto him like—Well, like my life depended on it, and I guess it really did. I half-listened to Samson’s instructions. He wouldn’t remember what had happened to him, if he ever did I had to get him to the Venture compound, I had to do whatever I needed to do to get him to the Venture compound, that’s where I’d find Samson, and he’d... I didn’t pay attention, he’d fix it somehow. Billy would be safe, and OSI wouldn’t care about him so long as he didn’t remember. Samson hadn’t wanted to leave him, but I had to promise to get my crap together and take care of things, and of course I would, I’d promise anything...

I’d make it right this time.

When Samson left, I brought Billy inside, put him in the unused bed and cleaned myself up. Found some canned food that was still good and put a meal together. Maybe not a good one, but a meal. 

When Billy woke up, I was sitting on the edge of his bed, just watching him. 

“... White?”

“Hey, fella.” I broke into the first real, easy smile I’d had since... Since. “You feeling all right?”

“Wha—what happened? I remember we left the Venture Compound, and then... Holy crap! What happened to my hand?! Wait—what happened to my _eye_?!”

“It’s a little fuzzy.” I said. I was supposed to lie to him. Whatever really happened, Samson said he wasn’t supposed to know. It’s not like I knew to tell him. And if he didn’t remember the dog fight, well, maybe that was for the best. “There was... there was an accident. The doctor said you’d probably remember things eventually. I... I’m really glad to see you, Billy Quizboy.”

“I’m not really Billy ‘Quizboy’ anymore...”

“Sure you are. You’ll always be Billy Quizboy.” I hugged him.

“Okay, seriously, White, how long have I been unconscious? Because you’re acting really weird.”

“Um...” I handed him a calendar. “I’m not sure which day it is. The month is right.”

He looked between the calendar and me with rising incredulity. I blushed—though I was sunburned enough that maybe he couldn’t tell—and looked down. 

“The month is right?”

“Hey, I’ve been kind of out of it, too. The good news is, we’ve got a home! I’m going to work on getting some kind of income for us. If you want, you can pretend to be my kid again, I bet we can get on welfare.”

“White...”

“I thought—“ I felt a little rising panic and tried to force it down. “I thought, as long as you can’t remember things real well, you’d... stay. I mean, hey, we got along okay together before, and... well, ‘til we get back on our feet, two can live as cheaply as one can, right?”

I hadn’t questioned at the time why Samson told me he’d be at the Venture Compound. I didn’t know what I’d do if Billy left. I didn’t know what this OSI was and why they’d be interested in him, or what might happen if I didn’t take care of him, or if he remembered whatever happened after we left. I was way too lost over everything, but if he’d just nod and say ‘yes’ and stay, maybe none of it would matter. It would never come up, and we’d go back to being friends.

“Well, not really, but... I guess without you, I don’t have any place to live. And I don’t really know anyone. Or have any prospects.” He hung his head. 

“Cheer up.” I handed him a plateful of food. “I made dinner. Things are looking up for us already! I promise.”

“Thanks.” He smiled up at me.

I’d broken every promise I’d ever made that man, but I was going to keep this one. No matter what, I was going to keep this one.


End file.
